Drive wiper. Working properly?

[Phil#2]

I've noticed recently that the Drive Wiper function has increased in speed.  So normally it would take around 7 hours set a 7 passes.  Now its done in about an hour.  Does this indicate that there is a problem?  I have the latest version of CCleaner Free.

Thank you.

[nukecad]

I don't know if drive wiper has been improved or not.

If it's an external drive then the USB port that it's plugged into can make a difference.
Obviously the size of the drive will make a difference to a full wipe, wiping a 120GB drive will be quicker than a 1TB drive.

If it's your system drive it can only wipe the free space, so how much is free will make a difference.

But 7 passes is overkill, one pass is sufficent to wipe a drive.

The options for multiple passes is a leftover from years ago when it may have been benificial. (But was usually overkill back then too).
I think it's been left there for those who do like overkill and would moan if the option was removed.

PS. Driving wiping is not something that you would "normally" need to do.
It's usually done so that deleted files can't later be recovered, eg. if you are selling/giving the drive or the computer to someone else.

(Although I have recently wiped the free space on all my external spinners after one of them crashed, lost the file table, and Recuva recovered years worth of old deleted files from it which I didn't really want back. Even worse I'd at one time used it as a backup drive so there were multiple copies of the old files recovered.
So I decided to wipe the free space on the others to avoid that issue if one of them should crash in future).

[Phil#2]

Thanks for the reply.  FWIW I use the drive wipe once a month or so.

Have tried an earlier version of CC, to see if it took the same amount of time for a wipe.  As with the most recent release, it says 7 hrs and then wipes in 1 hr at 7 passes.  I haven't changed the size of my drive dramatically of late, so around 500GB free. 

So to go from 7 rs to 1 hr when wiping the same amount of free space is a bit strange...

Can you recommend any other hard drive wiping software?  Be interesting to compare. 

However, be good to get to the bottom of just why CC is suddenly taking so much less time for a free space wipe.  Erasing internet history, takes the same time as usual.

Edited March 13, 2023 by Phil#2

[nukecad]

I've just put a 1TH external drive on my other laptop to wipe around 700GB of free space using one pass.
It's plugged into a USB2 post so I wasn't expecting fast speeds.
Sure enough it's reporting about 10 hours 20 mins to complete.
I never trust such estimates from any software or those from Windows itself, so we'll see.

With the coincidence of your 7:1 timings you have to wonder if in fact it's only doing one pass for you?
Which as I say is sufficent to render whatever was there unrecoverable so extra passes are not needed.
(It may even be recognising that a particular cluster is already 'empty' so not spending time writing to it).

 

The recommending of rival product is not allowed, this is a company forum after all.
As a moderator I'd usually remove any such recommendations for rival products, depending on the context of the post, so posting any myself would be out of order.
Google would be your friend there.

[Phil#2]

So I fully uninstalled CCleaner free, and installed CCleaner Pro.  It took a reassuring 8 hours for a 7 pass drive wipe.

It could have been that the old copy needed to be fully uninstalled and then reinstalled, FWIW I may just purchase the Pro version, as I use the program a fair bit.

So that seems to have solved it.  Thanks for your help.

[nukecad]

Good to hear that you sorted it to your satisfaction.

CCleaner Pro doesn't clean any differently from the Free version, but it does have extra tools and options available.
You appear to have installed the Pro trial so you can try them out and see if they are things that you want/need.

[Phil#2]

So this has been happening again unfortunately, when I try and wipe free space the hard drive starts to fill up.  I've tried re installing CCleaner, tried older versions and a system restore.  Nothing seems to work.

Any suggestions much appreciated.

[nukecad]

Sorry?

Your post back in March was saying that you thought that drive wiper was being "too fast".
ie it was estimating that it would take 7 hours, but in fact only taking one hour.

On 13/03/2023 at 14:31, Phil#2 said:

with the most recent release, it says 7 hrs and then wipes in 1 hr

Now you are saying that your drive  "starts to fill up".

3 hours ago, Phil#2 said:

 when I try and wipe free space the hard drive starts to fill up.

Can you tell us more, exactly what are you doing and exactly what are you seeing happen?

Note that a drive wipe does fill up the drive and then deletes what it has filled it with - but you don't normally watch it doing that in detail.

[Phil#2]

Correct, that was what I was saying in March and this is the problem now.

As stated in previous post, 'when I try and wipe free space the hard drive starts to fill up.'   That means the available space in the HD gets smaller and smaller during the wipe.  So during the wipe the HD goes from 400GB free, to 350GB free etc.  I then get a warning stating that files must be deleted.  When I stop the wipe, the HD immediately goes back to its original size, before the wipe.  

Edited October 26, 2023 by Phil#2

[nukecad]

As I say that is what a drive wipe does.

Overwrites the drive with files full of zeros (or Ones. Or 'Xs', or .....) and then deletes them all again. So that anyone trying to recover from that drive will only get zeros (or 'Xs', or ...).

You are getting a "Low disc space - delete some files" warning because you have Windows set to warn you if/when the drive is getting full.

You can turn that off if you want to, but there is no real need to.

https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/how-to-disable-low-disk-space-warning-in-windows-10.html

When you get the warning and stop the Wipe it deletes everything that it has written up to that point, freeing up all that space again.

As you have never exceeded that "Low disc space - delete some files" warning then the job is complete and your drive has been wiped.

[Phil#2]

Sorry, should have been clearer.

From what you are saying, its normal and expected to see the drive full up during a free space wipe, and then go back to normal size upon completion. 

Previously during a 7Hr wipe, the drive size wouldn't increase at all during the wipe.  From what you are saying, that would mean that the free space on my drive wasn't being wiped. Therefore, if the drive is filling up during a free space wipe, that's what it should be doing.

I get that in most cases a drive wipe isn't that necessary, if you are using CCleaner to wipe your internet history and delete files.  But it would be nice to have the back up of a free space drive wipe and know that it is working.